Richard Swinburne

"A cosmological argument is an argument to the existence of God from the existence of some finite object or, more specifically, a complex physical universe. There have been many versions of the cosmological argument given over the past two-and-a-half millennia; the most quoted are the second and third of Aquinas’s five ways to show the existence of God. However, Aquinas’s ‘five ways’, or rather the first four of his five ways, seem to me to be one of his least successful pieces of philosophy. In my view the two most persuasive and interesting versions of the cosmological argument are that given by Leibniz in his paper On the Ultimate Origination of Things, and that given by his contemporary Samuel Clarke in his Boyle Lectures for 1704 and published under the title A Demonstration of the Being and Attributes to God. The former seems to be the argument criticized by Kant in the Critique of Pure Reason and the latter the argument criticized by Hume in the Dialogues."